"We're thrilled to announce our next phase: the opening of DeepMind's first ever international AI research office in Edmonton, Canada, in close collaboration with the University of Alberta," DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis wrote on the company's website on Wednesday.

DeepMind will move into a temporary office in Edmonton at the end of the month before moving into a permanent building near the university at a later date. It's unclear where that office will be in the city or what that office will look like.

Canada is an obvious destination for DeepMind to expand to given the country's strong reputation when it comes to AI development. Many of Silicon Valley's top AI people hail from the country.

"It was a big decision for us to open our first non-UK research lab, and the fact we're doing so in Edmonton is a sign of the deep admiration and respect we have for the Canadian research community," wrote Hassabis.

DeepMind has had links with the University of Alberta for several years and nearly a dozen of its graduates have been hired by the company. The machine learning lab at the university has also received funding from DeepMind for an unknown number of PhDs. DeepMind plans to increase the amount of funding it gives to the university off the back of the new partnership.

"Our hope is that this collaboration will help turbo-charge Edmonton's growth as a technology and research hub, attracting even more world-class AI researchers to the region and helping to keep them there too," wrote Hassabis.

Founded by Hassabis, Mustafa Suleyman, and Shane Legg in 2010, DeepMind now employs over 400 people, with around 20 of those hires in Mountain View and the remainder in London.

"DeepMind Alberta" will be led by Michael Bowling, Patrick Pilarski, and Rich Sutton, who was DeepMind's first advisor back in 2010. All three are professors from the University of Alberta and will continue to hold their academic positions while working for DeepMind. Sutton said in the blog: "This alignment of academic and practitioner-led research will drive a whole host of new scientific breakthroughs right here in Canada, propelling the field of AI forwards into exciting new territory."

Steven Cave, the director of Cambridge University's new Centre for the Future of Intelligence, which has been set up to examine the morality and governance of AI, told Business Insider last November: "The best people are being offered huge sums of money to go and work at these tech companies. You find that you're talking to someone and they're expressing a great deal of interest in a research project and then they're snapped up.

He added: "We're thinking about imaginative solutions to this problem. We understand that ambitious young people want to work at these big name companies and earn lots of money and that's fine. But at the same time, we hope that there will be enough bright young things who are motivated by the intellectual challenge of the issues we're working on and by the sense of wanting to do something good that makes a difference for the world."